RANSVESTIA

roads to the crater and later to the Serengeti Hotel were the bum- piest I've ever experienced and I did a lot of driving around the western states when I was young and most roads were gravel. But these took the cake.

We eventually arrived at the Crater hotel which is perched right on the edge and looks down into this enormous pit several thousand feet deep and 10 to 12 miles across in each direction. It is quite a sight and it must have been really something hundreds of millions of years ago when it was an active volcano and "blew its top" like Krakatoa. Man, what an event! Next day we got into Land Rovers and went down into the crater. The road down and back was, if possible, worse than the roads getting there but we survived. There are several lakes in the crater which harbor great flocks of various water birds and also several different groups of hippopotamuses or is it hippopotomi? Unfortunately, they spent most of their time in the water up to their eyes so you can't see much. They do this to keep cool; the water carries much of their weight. They eat plant life on the shallow bottom and will get sun- burned if they stay out of the water very long.

We found a very comfortable pride of lions sitting and lying on the banks of a little stream in the crater. One male, about 10 to 12 females and a number of cubs of various ages. I didn't know that lions either could or would swim but one little cub on one side of the stream wanted to get to mother on the other side so he just jumped in and paddled across just as unconcerned by our presence some 20 feet away in buses as if there were no humans in a 100 miles. Large herds of zebras, wildebeasts, cape buffalo, were all around. The other name for Wildebeast is Gnu and you should have heard all the puns about them like, "a new Gnu is news but an old Gnu is like yesterdays Gnus paper." We had a great time popping up into the open roof to take pictures of all and sundry and seeing how close we could get to a rhino before he started to lope toward us--at which point the driver gunned us away. A Volkswagon will take a lot of punishment from rocky roads but would not stand up too well against a ton of mad meat bashing into it.

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